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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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THIS ENTRY IS WEIRDLY FULL OF RODENTS AND RUSSIA Boy, how about that day, huh? I am sure there was crappy weather somewhere, but Chicago was all bluesky smiles yesterday. Today, too. With the big puffy clouds that mostly just look like clouds, due not to a lack of imagination but to comfort level, letting stuff just be what it is. Although one cloud looked a lot like a dish of shrimp cocktail. The kind of day when weird stuff makes you happy, like seeing a guy in a turban and a fat Russian woman sharing a bag of Cheetos. Ethnic and gender differences just melt away when we are all stained orange with cheez dust. I have been quite strange lately. There are no convenient hormones or cold medicine to blame. THE TOP PART OF THE STRANGE, WHICH HAS ME RUNNING AROUND WITH STARS IN MY EYES (OW SO POINTY AND HOT) That sky. The way the El carries me along, moving so fast but my actual body not moving at all, like I am the literal expression of some pre-Socratic fragment or Zen koan (stillness/motion/blah blah). The tiny screws that hold the train together, and the faith I have in them. The fact that every single person on the train managed to get born. The twist my life is about to take, which everyone is sick of hearing about. All of these happy things are combining and periodically I just get kind of goopy and serene, like a human version of a big bowl of chocolate pudding. Or else I want to walk around like some crazy Russian mystic smiling and laying hands on everyone. When I was small I once went through what can only be described as a child-sized version of a manic phase or psychotic break. During that time I felt completely full of love for everything, including (especially?) inanimate objects, and in my head I thought of things that were in physical contact as kissing each other. The garbage is kissing the street, the pencil is kissing the desk, your hat is kissing your head. We were dangerously close to that state on the train yesterday. HOWEVER It is very easy to get pulled out of that state by minor annoyances. This may be a good thing, since if we all walked around like Kerouac saints being completely amazed at stuff nothing would ever get done. You'd go into Baskin-Robbins for a cone and the counter guy would say, "Like wow, man, CONE! Dig its conical nature!" My minor annoyances include: People who won't move away from you when there are empty seats on the train. This happened to me twice yesterday, as the car emptied out and this woman still sat there, trapping me on the inside, and LADY WE DO NOT NEED TO BE THIS CLOSE TO ONE ANOTHER. This gross, painful, and unpleasant small bump in my right armpit. Who knows if it is an ingrown hair, shaving accident, a zit, or what, but you would not believe how something so small could be so irritating all day long. Or maybe you would, because maybe you have had a similar condition. If that's true, please tell me what this could be, so I don't start thinking I have Armpit Typhoid. The fact that the New York Times food section, which I look forward to all week, completely sucked today. The main articles were about barbecued ribs and country-smoked hams, which are two foods that do not interest me, William Grimes reviewed some big "family-style" red-sauce Italian place (yawn), and Eric Asimov reviewed Chipotle, of all places. I have been known to eat there, but I have been known to eat Wheat Thins with cream cheese and grape jelly too, and neither one of these meals deserves to be reviewed in the Times. Yeesh. COOKING STYLES My friend S. might have a chance to be some kind of photo stylist (okay, here is where the truth comes out that I don't really have a clear idea what she does for a living, and in fact I may have made up the term "photo stylist")* for a shoot involving Jamie Oliver, the cute-in-a-bad-teeth-British-way star of "The Naked Chef." I have seen the show only a few times, but I have decided that I rather like this guy, if only for the way he seems to cook the ever-living shit out of everything he touches. He's always grabbing vegetables and mashing potatoes and pounding strips of veal, and he even says semi-sexual, semi-violent things like "now we're going hardcore" and "a wicked bit of custard" and "make the chicken lie down flat!" I would not be at all surprised if Jamie Oliver were into, say, extreme bondage or cockgagging, and here come the process servers now with that libel lawsuit, and here I go out the side door. Remember: You never saw me. (*It seems I did not, according to Google, although I still am unclear on what a photo stylist does.) This is certainly not the way I cook. I cook the way I used to exercise---no distractions except maybe the radio, mind as blank as I can get it. And I like to do things kind of slowly, no rushing around. And I like to follow directions for the most part, particularly if I am making something new, but be able to get creative if I feel like it. And I like to have a big glass of wine, and maybe a second glass if there is any Down Time like something being in the oven. And I don�t want any help. I have a feeling this making-a-meal style will change drastically once we get Nora home, and instead of calmly slicing up vegetables and drinking my lovely glass of wine I will be frantically mixing up formula with a swizzle stick and sharing a plate of cream cheese/grape jelly Wheat Thins with LT. LINKS The letters of Augustus Merriam. An absolute must-read. Trust me. Watch some little movies.
PARDON ME WHILE I GET ALL STRANGE AGAIN Do you know this story? About the tigers, and the mouse, and the strawberry, and so forth? I was thinking about it the other day, and also about some other parable-type thing about time, which I think is Russian in origin and which I cannot locate now, about watching a mouse move through a field. You see the mouse as moving forward constantly, in a straight line, but you could also see it as the mouse taking a new step each time. Everything constantly new, moment after moment separate and entire. Like the number one, which is more of an idea than a regular counting number: it would be perfectly legitimate, to my mind, to say "egg two three four" or whatever.* Why am I thinking about this? A Buddhist would say that we should try to find the eternity in the moment, and since I am so obsessed with small moments I would say that no, we have to seek out the individual moments in eternity, and the Buddhist would smile smugly and say "these things are one and the same," and I would tell the Buddhist to shut the hell up, and the Buddhist would say "no YOU shut up," and then maybe I would beat the Buddhist up a little. But maybe not because they have that nonviolent thing going and it's not very sporting. *Mimi's Wack-Ass Number Theory #7. Wow, that paragraph was seriously garbled but it made sense to me. Maybe we should share a joint or something and I can explain it further. Because this is a no-editing journal, dang it. IN OTHER NEWS I have been abusing the label printer at work. Now I have a sheet of one hundred stickers that say NOT APPROVED FOR RECTAL USE. Oh, the many things not approved for rectal use! Salsa! Framed diplomas! Public telephone receivers! American Girl dolls! Watch for these stickers around Chicago! ---mimi smartypants reads you loud and clear. back/forward |
